Clone clovers update: This week marks the third Time-Newsweek Clone Covers of 2004. (Visit Clone Covers, 2003, for an explanation and archive.) By this week last year, there had been four clone covers. Perhaps, it can be argued that the covers this week are not clones but rather first cousins as they do not have the exact same image or headline as in past examples. However, the cautious glazes of soldiers on each cover and the message implication that both covers share clearly place them in the clone category. (Besides, it’s my blog feature and I call ‘em the way I see ‘em.)

April 19, 2004

I’ll leave it to the warbloggers to argue how ridiculous it is to equate Iraq with Viet Nam or to point out how consistently the hand-wringing Monday-morning punditry of the “major media” has over-stated the hopelessness of each new military action in this current war. However, below, I remind you of two separate clone covers weeks from last year that, except for this year’s cover heads that sound like movie or book titles rather than last year’s interrogatory headlines, are clones of this week’s clones:

September 1, 2003

April 7, 2003

Apologies, Radio news aggregator users: Rather than simply remove my RSS feed from his Radio news aggregator, Steve Kirks was kind enough to let me know that a random HTML tag I was putting in some of my posts (to solve a Safari display problem) was wreaking havoc with his (and others, presumably) news reader display. I have removed the responsible tag from the most recent posts in which I used it. Not only did Steve alert me, he was nice enough to forward a screen shot of the problem so I could see it and even suggested a solution. That’s the kind of conversational media that weblogs are all about.

Cool: Goalie Tomas Vokoun made 41 saves - including 22 in the third period - to backstop the Nashville Predators to a 3-1 victory over the Detroit Red Wings this afternoon. The victory was the first playoff win in Nashville’s history, and came in the first playoff game the franchise has hosted.

Forgive me again, Dr. Stanley: Last week, I said I can’t think of a less likely candidate for a dance remix than Man of Constant Sorrow. Well, I also can’t think of a less likely candidate for a hip-hop remix. Thanks to Cory Doctorow’s post on Boing Boing, I now know that Battlestar America has one and you can download an excerpt of it at this 1.4MB MP3 link.

Inspiring: Represent, a magazine by and for Youth in Foster Care is profiled by AP writer Donna De La Cruz.

Lileks imitates Seinfeld: The amazing James Lileks on how men’s magazines and women’s magazines differ.

Too much of an unnecessary thing? Newsweek’s Peg Tyre looks at the teen girl magazine category and concludes, “…magazine executives are relearning what they must have forgotten since their junior-high days: there’s no one more fickle than a teenage girl.”

Archiving in a digital age: The U.S. Archives (keeper of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, etc.) is developing strategies for preserving for the future the vast amounts of data federal agencies churn out each day. This article by John Carlin, the archivist of the U.S.,outlines the challenge and what they are doing about it. (As typical, my source of such insightful yet off-my-typical-pathway material is Gary Price, keeper of Resource Shelf.

Excerpt:

Although we take very seriously our stewardship of such precious documents (as The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, important acts of Congress, Supreme Court decisions, patent applications, presidential executive orders, treaties), much of our work centers on our role as the government’s keeper of the records created by federal agencies and departments in their day-to-day activities.

However, while billions of pages of paper records continue to come to us, more and more of the records we get from federal agencies are the products of electronic government. In fact, we’re seeing an explosion in the number of electronic text documents, financial presentations, photographs and images, e-mails, and web sites.

This presents a major challenge for us: How to preserve these electronic records so that many years from now, when the hardware and software used to create them no longer exist, they can still be read.

It’s a challenge we simply must meet.

If we don’t, the records our government is creating every day will be lost forever. Records of service members now in the Middle East who will need them in twenty-five or thirty years to claim veterans’ benefits would be lost. So would Food and Drug Administration records that document adverse reactions to drugs. And the Social Security Administration will need your file for several generations until all potential claims are exhausted.

This is why we’re building the Electronic Records Archives (ERA)—so that anyone, anywhere, anytime, far into the future, can access these records with the technology in use then.

Moreover, while ERA will preserve the electronic records of our national government, it will also have another important benefit. It will provide information technology that can be scaled and adapted for use outside the federal government.

That means that state and local governments, colleges and universities, libraries and archives, small businesses and large corporations, and many other sectors of our society will be able to benefit from the federal expenditures made on ERA. They will be able to preserve their electronic records for as long as they need them and archive them in any way they choose.

Indeed, the technology we develop for the ERA could have an impact around the world, as it is adapted to other kinds of institutions not found in the United States—even in countries that approach recordkeeping far differently than we do.

The full article.